Bruins embrace another series against Canadiens

Tuesday

Apr 29, 2014 at 11:20 PMApr 29, 2014 at 11:25 PM

The upcoming series between the Bruins and the Canadiens, which will start Thursday night in Boston, is about much more than two well-matched teams that raced through Round 1 of the playoffs. The intensity of the rivalry, which includes 33 previous playoff match-ups, makes the B's want to win that much more.

Mike Loftus The Patriot Ledger

BOSTON – So exactly how big is this Bruins-Canadiens playoff rivalry?

Something like that is probably impossible to measure, but it’s at least big enough that someone doesn’t even have to have participated to know about it, and get excited by it.

“I feel like I’ve watched the rivalry my whole life,” said Justin Florek, the 23-year-old winger from Michigan who’s hoping for a chance to suit up for the 34th edition of the series. “It’s great to be a part of it, to get a chance to be here with the guys and see what it’s like.”

“I know it’s special,” said Carl Soderberg, who played professionally for more than a decade in his native Sweden before finally getting to Boston, and the NHL, a year ago. “I know the past – a lot of playoff series against each other, and Montreal has a little advantage. So we want to beat them, for sure.”

Soderberg may underestimate the Canadiens’ “little advantage” – Montreal has won 24 of 33 series so far – but he’s dead-on accurate when it comes to knowing how much the B’s want to beat the hated Habs. The 28-year-old center made it into this season’s four regular-season games against Montreal, so he’s pretty keenly aware that the Bruins can get themselves in trouble if they let their emotions get the best of them.

“We have to stick with our game, and not get too frustrated or whatever,” he said. “We just have to stay calm.”

Soderberg will soon find out how much easier that’s said than done. But for what it’s worth, his more experienced teammates, veterans of multiple B’s-Habs series, don’t even try to disguise how much they relish the idea of eliminating the Canadiens.

“It’s basically the big rivalry,” said center Patrice Bergeron, who played in his first Boston-Montreal series as a rookie in 2003-04. “It’s great to have. It’s great for the fans, it’s great for us as players. It gets you going, gets you even more emotionally attached to games. You want to win that much more.”

David Krejci, who enters his fourth series against the Canadiens, marvels at how the rivalry isn’t confined solely to the ice.

“Media and fans and people around us are going to put extra heat to it,” he said. “I guess we’re kind of used to it. We know going into the series it’s going to be like that. (Reporters) are going to try to find out lots of bad things about individuals.

“But I guess it’s better this way. It gets you more ready for the games. It gets you more excited.”

Bruins coach Claude Julien has perhaps the best perspective on the rivalry, since he’s been on both sides of it: As a first-year, full-time NHL head coach in 2003-04, he brought Montreal back from deficits of 0-2 and 1-3 to beat the favored Bruins in seven games. Boston fans forgave that in 2011, when Julien and the B’s recovered from losing Games 1 and 2 at TD Garden to score a seven-game win that started their run to the Stanley Cup.

“I hated Boston when I was in Montreal,” Julien said. “Now I hate Montreal, because I’m in Boston.”

This year’s Canadiens series, the Bruins’ fourth in seven years under Julien (he and the B’s lost in 2008, then won in ’09 and ’11), could be the best of the bunch. After six straight first-round series, the teams are meeting in Round 2, and both are coming off impressive wins in Round 1. The B’s, despite concerns about how they’d handle the speedy Detroit Red Wings, won four in a row to advance in five games, while the Habs swept the Tampa Bay Lightning in four.

All the more incentive to knock them off, say the Bruins.

“It just makes you want to beat these guys so bad – and once you do it, there’s only four teams left,” Krejci said. “That’s kind of exciting.”